We celebrate World Sight Day 2018

11/10/2018

Today, October 11, World Sight Day (WSD)is celebrated to fight blindness and visual disability that affects the world population.

According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), we know that 1.2 billion people do not have access to glasses, and that Over 3 out of 4->75%–of the world’s vision impaired are avoidably so. For this reason, this year, the IAPB (The International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness), under the motto "Eye care everywhere", focuses attention on anyone having access to good ocular health anywhere in the world without discrimination.

The WHO and the IAPB created, in 1999 in the city of Geneva, the VISION 2020 World Action Plan: The Right to Sight seeking to promote "a world in which nobody suffers from visual impairment by avoidable causes." Under this slogan, the intention was and continues to be "to intensify and accelerate the activities of prevention of blindness and thus achieve the goal of eliminating avoidable blindness by the year 2020".

The early diagnosis of the different complications through ophthalmological examinations can modify the visual prognosis of affected patients. In some diseases such as glaucoma, high myopia or keratoconus we cannot eradicate the disease, but early detection is crucial to avoid other problems that may arise in the future.

It is for this reason that from the Barraquer Foundation, in collaboration with the Barraquer Ophthalmology Centre, we continue with free check-ups of intraocular pressure to detect glaucoma in different markets of Barcelona. With these check-ups, we want to detect glaucoma at early stages and, at the same time, make the population aware of the importance of periodic controls of intraocular pressure.

We join the celebration of World Sight Day and we do our bit by revising the intraocular pressure for early detection of glaucoma today at the Mercat de Sant Andreu, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.